A personalist society, be it democratic or monarchical, will foster those occupations attached directly to fundamentally human needs. Man needs to build; he needs to plant and to plow, to make things with his hands, to incarnate his aspirations in song and the plastic arts; he needs to fight, and he needs to pray. The peasant, the artisan, the soldier, the scholar, the poet, the priest—these will dominate any humanist culture in Belloc’s sense of the term. A broad base of well-distributed property will lie under the whole economic organism, insuring the personal character of the _res publica_, stamping it with the mark of humanity. Belloc has little use for a merchant society (exemplified in his eyes by Carthage and Whig England). The merchant necessarily is engaged in furthering his own profit, and he must prosper by feeding on those elements within the community that are productive. Merchants will always be in a society, but if the state is controlled by their spirit, then the City of Man is finished. Profit, not human perfection, is the bourgeois ideal. Viewed ideally, Belloc’s humanist society, on which he constructed his distributist economics, would be characterized by a rich multiplicity of functions rooted in fundamental human drives. The City of Man is the extension, the natural fulfillment, and the guarantee of the personal integration symbolized by _The Four Men_. Man, unalienated in the densities of his own subjectivity, achieves an objective corporate unity with his fellows. Even the most penetrating and private of natural mysteries, that of poetic creation, finds its full significance only in the Forum. “For the Poet, though divine, is a servant. He is the god of the house of Admetus; and not all his fellowship with heaven would make him what he is did he not bring to birth the struggling song, as yet undelivered in his fellow men.”[62]